Sagara

Smalltown Supersound; 2011

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So far, Oslo-based producer diskJokke (Joachim Dyrdahl) has been the best kind of anonymous: a producer beholden to a genre (space disco) who consistently pumps out tidy, form-fitting jams. His music is defined as much by its constraints-- self-imposed, mostly-- as by its content (that he has worked as a mathematician makes perfect sense). But here, Dyrdahl has strays from the strictures of beatific electronic music in favor of tone-poem ambience.

Sagara was commissioned by Norway's Øya festival, which provided Dyrdahl the resources to travel to a place of his choosing and study music. After sampling musicians in Bali and Java, Dyrdahl abandoned the idea of a dance album and instead focused on incorporating the tones and modalities of Gamelan music into pillow-soft mood pieces. It's not much of a stretch: Gamelan is typically busier and noisier than Sagara, but its massing of percussive sounds can lead to an ethereal blur. Dyrdahl takes that blur and spreads it, jam-like, over long instrumental passages.

The resulting sound isn't "new" unless you're the type of person who owns only diskJokke albums, but Dyrdahl's background as a classically trained violinist and electronic producer serves him well here. Sagara has a rich, saturated ambience that deserves a fine sound system and a generous twist of the volume knob, but it's uneventful in a way that suggests patience. This is nowhere more evident than on "Mandena" which, after three minutes of bare nothingness, acquires a misty palpitation and a splattering of percussive tones. At just over 35 minutes long, Sagara is refreshingly unimpressed with its own concept or bigness. It is a short, loving letter from Dyrdahl to a music and region that has inspired him.

It's not until the final track, "Panutup", that Dyrdahl's instincts as a dance producer get the best of him. He lifts his tonal haze, offers some gorgeous ringing chords and field recordings before introducing-- finally!-- a thwumping disco bassline and a steady, surging kick drum. Dyrdahl spins this sudden percussiveness into a skyward, uplifting Balearic anthem before fading it out again. It's a moment of such surprising and stunning motion that it's possible to view the previous 30 minutes of music as one long, patient build. (There is an irony to the notion that the one time Dyrdahl really approaches the beauty and mysticism of Gamelan is when he interrupts his experiment and returns to his craft.) Dyrdahl never received enough credit for the excellent sound design of his work, and while Sagara seems nothing more than an interesting detour, his careful ear and sense of structure are here in spades.